Yes I can put this in to perspective. This video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp9iJ3pPuL8 which CNN also had a heavily edited version of with a hyperbole tagline and was calling an "exclusive" a couple days ago (even though it was filmed for videonews.com, an indy Japan news site) gets within 1.5 km of Fukushima Daiichi. The max level they reached was ~110 uS/hr. Hopefully I don't need to pull up the xcdb chart to show how fear-mongering CNN has been in all this. As a side note, in the video I linked, the wandering dogs and cows should freak you out far more than the radiation, most truly apocalyptic thing I've seen in my life (and this from someone who has seen every episode of Survivors haha). The joke amongst us ex-pats is the coming dogzillas are far scarier than any radiation. ;)

Living in Japan, we get the "advantage" of taking typhoons lightly (as they are called in our part of the world.) Typhoons don't scare me a bit, been through extremely heavy ones and only miles from the coast. Once went out in a huge one to tear sheet metal off the car park roof that might of blown into neighbor's houses (felt manly that day.) Earthquakes are a whole nother story though, the big ones make you fear for your life within seconds. I get your point though I have to say. I suppose it's why we stay, it's our home for better or worse. Hurricanes, quakes, meltdowns be damned the rest of the quality of life is too important to stop fighting.

And as for not mismanaging nuclear power there was a wonderful old Buddhist nun on the news today talking about this, putting it into a wonderful old Buddhist perspective. Shortened and very paraphrased but, "When I grew up we had so much less power. Why do we need more today? Put on more clothes in the winter, and wear less in Summer."

Absolutely right. Living here in Japan I can barely watch the western news anymore, every time I see "Japan Crisis Breaking News!" it pisses me off to no end. One they are usually hours or days behind on the "breaking news", two they are often wrong, and most importantly what you said, they are overshadowing the far more tragic events happening here. 100s of 1000s are homeless, 10s of 1000s in horribly cramped shelters, countless businesses are gone, entire industries are gone, so many have died that they had to resort to mass graves as the crematoriums are full. Can't say how many times I've been reduced to tears watching the NHK nightly news here with the stories they tell of the survivors and the lost. This is what the western world should be focusing on too as we are here.

Here in Japan you "charge" the payment systems before hand with cash at machines that are all around. They are not linked to any kind of personal data at all if you don't want them to be. Upside you don't have the problems you mentioned. Downside you lose a fully charged card you're out all that money, same thing with cash though. There are also no fees here in fact I get airline miles by using mine, it's quite convenient really.

We are far enough away as not to worry horribly personally, but this is happening in the country I live in. My question to those familiar with such things on here is how effective is the technique they will use over the next two days of flooding the core with sea water? That is as much as we know technically at this point so I can't go into more details, not being an expert on nuclear power myself, but I would to here any info from the slashdot crowd on how this works and how effective it might be.

And to quickly summarize from this perspective for those outside the country trying to piece together news. All the reactors here (I believe) shut down properly when the quake struck, as designed. However Fukushima Dai-1 (No. 1) was also hit hard by the tsunamis which took out it's main and back-up generators which were used to pump cooling water into the cores. Late last night they were frantically trying to fly in generators but apparently they did not get there soon enough or did not work well enough and you have what we see now, a meltdown which has probably already begun (nobody here knows either). A lack of power to get cooling fluid into the core causing a possible meltdown, to simplify even more...